Re: The math tag

Great! This can be the place to test stuff (the "sandbox") - if it loads really slowly we will know it is the math tag doing it. (Well, we may not know because our browsers will cache the results, but a new visitor may see it load slowly)

"The physicists defer only to mathematicians, and the mathematicians defer only to God ..." - Leon M. Lederman

Re: The math tag

Re: The math tag

The renderer isn't mine, it is "mimetex".

It is supposed to make formulas easier to present - so long as you can understand it and it doesn't take too long to render, then that are the first two criteria done. Fast is good, and mimetex seem to be reasonably fast.

Mimetex is fully self-contained, whilst other LaTeX renderers rely on 3 or 4 processes to complete the task (for example, arranging the letters and symbols, then outputting them to postscript using another package, then converting that to a gif using yet another package)

"The physicists defer only to mathematicians, and the mathematicians defer only to God ..." - Leon M. Lederman

Re: The math tag

Well, I have been researching, and have found a utility that can help. It takes "dvi" output and turns it into "png" in one step. This means that I may be able to use the standard "latex" program, (which creates "dvi"s). If I can crack this nut then we might have a better solution.

It could be CPU-intensive, so I would need to cache the answers (so it is only run once not every time someone looks at the page), maybe use the first 50 characters as an identifier, or something.

I will continue to investigate.

"The physicists defer only to mathematicians, and the mathematicians defer only to God ..." - Leon M. Lederman